Bringing down borders, enforcing Europe’s police

The Schengen land and sea borders may be coming down on 21 December just ahead of Slovenia’s takeover of the EU presidency but Ljubljana will still have to ensure that airports follow in a similarly smart fashion come April.

After that the focus will be on Romania and Bulgaria’s entry into the Schengen zone with the progress on a new technological system, Schengen Information System II (SIS II), also to be followed closely.

The borders theme will continue with a ministerial conference on external borders in March which will look at the wider picture of the EU’s borders and ideas for improving the work of Frontex, the EU’s border agency.

Migration will be a strong theme with a focus on the returns directive, the directive sanctioning employers which hire illegal migrants and further examination of the green paper on asylum policy. Discussion will also continue on the EU ‘blue cards’ scheme, under which the entry of skilled immigrants into the EU would be facilitated, but this dossier is not expected to be finalised.

Discussions will also continue on the proposal by the Commission to set up a database to track the use and storage of explosives across the EU and to ensure that previous laws drafted at EU level are implemented, following a report by the Commission that not all counter-terrorism laws were being transposed into national law.

The recently proposed changes to the framework decision on counter-terrorism to outlaw the posting on the internet of information, for instance on making bombs, will continue to be debated.

Slovenia hopes to get a final agreement on changes to turn Europol into an agency, which has been a major dossier of both the German and Portuguese presidencies.

Discussions will continue on proposed changes to Eurojust, with agreement expected on information exchange and its links with the European Judicial Network. But the bigger themes of giving Eurojust more powers and setting up a European public prosecutor are not to be examined in any serious way until the reform treaty comes into force.

Slovenia is to propose a law seeking clarification on court judgements made in absentia as a way of addressing the failure to enact a law under the German presidency to set down a minimum set of standards for suspects. The law will define in absentia and will be most relevant when involving European arrest warrant cases.

Slovenia also hopes to sign off on a law criminalising breaches of environmental legislation, which officials say has progressed well under the Portuguese presidency. The Commission has revised this proposed law following a recent European Court of Justice ruling which said that member states should be free to set the type and level of penalty.

Perhaps the most troublesome dossier to be tackled during the Slovenian presidency in the field of justice is the proposal which would allow the courts of one member state to apply the divorce law of another when couples from different countries are terminating their marriage, known as Rome III. The proposal is highly controversial because some states, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, argue it could lead to European countries implementing Islamic sharia law.